Who Do You Think You Are?

So my friend Bekah bought me this book for Christmas. She told me about it when she ordered it and told me that she really believed it would teach me something. Well she gave it to me Thursday and I just started it last night. This book is written by Mark Driscoll and so far its really great! Mark's whole basis for this book is that there is an identity crisis going on, it has always been going on and we need to address it or it effects every sector of our lives.

What caused Adam and Eve to sin was that they didn't have a firm grasp of their identity in God, in what God thought of them and the implications this had on them. When they lost this grasp of their purpose and the God they followed, they feel quick to temptation and so is our history. But we do the same, losing our identity in Christ makes us fall to temptation so much easier because we settle. We try to form an identity everyday; whether its through friends, relationships, clothes, music, where we hangout, the list is endless. Rather than filling our identity with Christ we try, well, everything else. God made nothing else in His image other than us. Nothing. Mark is taking it right back, saying that we cant seek our identity in what we do, who we are with, who we think we are, etc

"When we reflect something of God with our heads, hearts, and hands out of love for Him and others, we do what we are created for" - Mark Driscoll

Everyday we try and construct an identity for ourselves while forgetting about the one God has already given us. We were created for worship because in the eyes of God our choices, values, words, actions, and thoughts are all acts of worship; which make up our identity. Instead we project the desired image we want onto the people around us, but without this solid foundation we often become lost and question this identity which we have founded on rocky ground. If we don't have a solid idea of who we are in Christ or who we are at all then we can easily give way to peer pressure, people pleasing, codependency and fear of those around us. But then, others are dictating to us what our identity is and we use them to fulfill our need to belong, be liked or be desired. 

"My identity is in/through/because of Jesus, and applying it to my life"

Not having a firm grasp of our identities can lead in disastrous directions. When we turn to seeking our own individual identities it results in repeating the same painful process over and over again without getting satisfying results. This can result in moving from one addiction and compulsion to another, one religious commitment to another, and one relationship to another, and each time it ends with the question... "Who even am I?". This is one of those books which screams out at you saying "AHHH READ THIS BECAUSE ITS ABOUT YOU!", well thats what I took from it. 

Something Mark also addressed was how we can't form our identity on the person we are going to be, we cannot live for the future in this way because our identity will always be out there rather than in the present secured by Jesus. Our efforts should not be so focused on the future and our efforts that we forget about Christ today; who He will make us, what He will have us do and what He will give us tomorrow. 

Too often I live in the future, worry about it, stress over it, worry that decisions I make now will result in drastically effecting my future in a negative way. But I cant live this way. I stress so much between two images of myself; Vikki in Ireland and Vikki in America, and I don't know which one is the one I want to roll with after I graduate but again this is wrong, I'm withholding my identity until that degree is in my hand. Its so easy for us to think of our identity as being us with frills on; like our identity will consist of what our degree is, who we are married to, the house we live in, our hobbies etc etc but what it comes down to at the end of the day is that our identity is our relationship with Jesus Christ, how He views us and having a firm knowledge of what this is... will determine how we live out the rest of our lives. 

For right now, I need to remind myself daily that the most important ground is that right below my feet, that my mission field is whats right under me and the people who are around me at that time. I have searched for my identity in all the wrong places, Ive tried defining it on where I live, my friends, clothes, music, the list goes on. But now I'm going to find it in the right place, which was there all along.